Was Sarin Used by Americans in the Vietnam War?

Sarin is a nerve gas. It contains phophonofluoride. Sarin disables
acetylcholinesterase, an
enzyme essential for the control of nerve impulse transmission.
Professional journalists, April Oliver
and Jack Smith,
spent many months investigating allegations that nerve gas was used in 1970
in a covert
US military operation in Laos. In September, 1970, US special forces known
as the Studies
and Observations Group (SOG) participated in Operation Tailwind and attacked
an enemy
village in Laos. Oliver and Smith presented their findings in the CNN
broadcast, "Valley of
Death," which aired on June 7, 1998. This was a joint production of CNN and
Time.

CNN was pressured by the Pentagon to fire Oliver and Smith.
The executives at CNN had
panic and fear in their faces. The lawyer for CNN oversaw the preparation of
the retraction
statement which alleged that Oliver and Smith had done a poor job of
ascertaining the facts.1

There were several witnesses that poison gas had been used in Tailwind, but there
was confusion over the identification of the gases. Tom Plaster
stated that CBU-19 was used. CBU-19 was a "sleeping gas." It was not
sarin.2
Art Bishop,
one of the pilots in Tailwind, wrote in his diary that CBU-30 was used.
Two men who
participated in Tailwind said this gas
"was stronger than tear gas."3
Mike Hagen, a platoon
sergeant in Tailwind, was convinced that sarin was used, "becuase I have no
feelings from
the knees down," he said.4

Because of these inconsistent reports from the field, Oliver and Smith sought
accurate
information from military records, but found a stone wall of noninformation.
In their
defense of the credibility of there reporting of this news story,5
they write:

The Pentagon failed to locate any of the original documents that would
have
logged what kinds of weapons were used by warplanes supporting Operation
Tailwind. But a computer database from that period recorded that US
aircraft
dropped CBU-15 -- the code name for sarin nerve gas -- some 2,000 times
in
1970. Pentagon officials dismissed this as a 'coding problem,' according
to one
report."

Lt. van Buskirk was in Operation Tailwind and he later wrote a book about his war time
experiences.
When Oliver and Smith initially contacted van Buskirk by phone, he supported
the view that
sarin may have been used. He did not mention this in his book because he
thought it was
too top secret. Quoting from Oliver and Smith,6
". . . the gas symptoms actually described
there [by van Buskirk in his book] (nausea, bending over and vomiting) are
more consistent
with sarin and are more arguably inconsistent with tear gas dispersed in an
open area." In
their first telephone interview, they quote van Buskirk as saying, "I didn't
really talk about
the gas [in my book] because it was too top secret. It was delivered in
CBU-19s" "That stuff
they put in the CBU-19s made us sick." "The rest of the enemy all died from
gas." "Oh,
yeah, it was a lethal war gas." "My unit puked their brains out. We all got
amoebic
dysentery. Everyone's nose ran and all this mucous started coming out of
everyone's
nostrils. Lots of enemy started having seizures . . . " Lt. van Buskirk
later changed his story
and said that the gas was more like CBU-15 or CBU-16. Oliver and Smith noted
that, "The
confusion may have arisen because of the military's subordinate designation
of sarin nerve
gas, BLU-19." They concluded that van Buskirk spoke truly the first time and
that the gas
was more probably sarin than tear gas.

Commanding officers do not always tell everything to their subordinates.
Without the
cooperation of the people who really did know what kind of gas was used, we
are left to
speculate like many of the participants in Tailwind. Sterling Seagrave, in
Yellow Rain, investigated reports of a lethal gas known
as yellow rain. It was used against the Hmong people in Laos after the
Americans had abandoned Vietnam. Seagrave found that chemical warfare has
become a
high tech operation. New chemicals and biotoxins are difficult to identify.
Information about
them is kept secret from the general public. Combinations of chemicals might
have
unpredicted effects.

Dr. Matthew Meselson, a famous Harvard biologist, investigated reports of
yellow rain. Meselson pointed out that ". . . adamsite, when it is hydrolyzed by
contact with water, becomes
diphenylarseneous oxide, which is a very poisonous form of arsenic. Anyone who
swallowed it would be killed.
Adamsite was stocked by the U.S. Army in Vietnam in hand grenades, marked "not to be
used where deaths are
not acceptable." Adamsite was a vomiting agent. It had a history of being used for
riot control. In non-combat
situations, CN, CS (tear gases) and DM (the Army code name for adamsite) are used in low enough
concentrations to avoid
serious injury. In a combat zone in a distant land, there was no restraint on the
dosage of such gases.7 This
might seem plausible except that Oliver and Smith were advised by experts that
". . . sarin nerve gas at the prevailing
temperatures in Laos is NOT LETHAL THROUGH THE SKIN. An M-17 gas mask is sufficient
protection, and full
body suits are not required for protection."8 In a tropical climate, sarin
reacts differently than it did on the battlefields of Europe in World War I.

Operation Tailwind is only one instance of the allegations that nerve gas was used
in the Vietnam War. On
August 8, 1970, the Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, reported that VX nerve
gas was used by American
Special Forces in Cambodia:9

"A military source in Saigon says that a deadly nerve gas has been used against
North Vietnamese
troops in Cambodia last year. It was part of an experiment called 'Project
Waterfall' -- a top-secret
experimental program headed by the U.S. Department of Defense. The gas, with the
code name VX,
was dropped from airplanes over an area chosen by the American Special
Forces. . . "

The story was originally reported by Tom Marlowe of the Dispatch News Service in
Saigon. According
to Marlowe, his sources said two one-hundred-pound containers of oily VX were
spread over an area
of Cambodia believed by the Special Forces to be massed with North Vietnamese
troops. This phase
of Operation Waterfall, which took place during 1969, was called Operation
Redcap. There was no
indication what results were achieved.

The New York Times, on May 8, 1970, reported that GB, a lethal nerve gas, had
been stored at Bien Hoa Air
Base in Vietnam. A press conference was held in Boston by the National Committee for
a Citizens Commission of
Inquiry on United States War Crimes in Vietnam. This was a private group of citizens.
Former Army Lt. Larry
Rottman spoke at this conference. He said that in 1967 and 1968 he saw containers
marked with the code name
GB stored at Bien Hoa Air Base. Although he did not see it being used, he had heard
reports of it being used.10
GB was a code name for sarin.

By 1970, then, rumors and reports had leaked out that nerve gas had been stored in
South Vietnam and used by
the U.S. military. In the defense of their "Valley of Death" broadcast, Oliver and
Smith refer to statements of
witnesses that a blond American who was believed to be a defector was killed in
Operation Tailwind.11 Lt. van
Buskirk immediately knew that the blond man was American and gave him a chance to
come back, but was
rebuffed. His colonel told him not to discuss the incident and not to include the
killing of the blond man in his after action report.
The colonel led him to believe that the blond man was a Russian who was mistaken for
an American and said to "forget this ever happened." However, Lt. van Buskirk had
been told by a Military Intelligence officer in Saigon that he might find
"turncoats" on this mission and that he
should not bring back prisoners for any reason.

My tour of duty in Vietnam was from April 7, 1969 to March 28, 1970. Not long after
I came in country, I met a
blond haired young man who was an interpreter in a Montagnard village. He was
organizing the gathering of
evidence that nerve gas was being used. The next time I planned to meet with him,
his friends said he was never
coming back. If this was the same man that Lt. van Buskirk fragged about a year and
a half later, the allegations
about nerve gas in Operation Tailwind might be less important than the allegations
that there were Americans who had fled to Laos, for whatever reason.

Another informant that nerve gas was being used was a mortarman in the 22nd Infantry
Battalion, First Brigade,
4th Infantry Division. Ths informant showed me crates for artillery rounds which had
been opened. They had
unusual markings. He was certain that the rounds contained sarin. As a mortarman, I
was familiar with the
standard types of rounds which we used every day. We used high explosive, white
phosphorus and illumination.
We had been told in Advanced Infantry Training that there were rounds with other color
codes, but that we would
never see them in Vietnam.

My informant was later murdered. He was shot by a 105 howitzer round at close range
while he stood in chow
line in 1970. The 105 squad had practiced for two weeks to make it look like an accident.
After he died, I was ordered by
a commanding officer to gather all of his clothes and personal effects and throw
them in a trash barrel on top of
the body parts to be burned. I found some pictures in the leg pocket of his
fatigues. These pictures show who he
was and who his friends were.
Intelligence cultists who are hiding war crimes have gone to an extraordinary effort to
suppress any knowledge of his murder.